When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH MONEY AND ECONOMIC INFLUENCE
“virtually all of the many hundreds of Court Jews were related by marriage.
This was of considerable advantage for their financial, diplomatic,
and dynastic services.” [BREUER, p. 112]
Not surprisingly, on the other end of the economic spectrum, Jewish street
thieves and robbers followed the same clannish pattern as their wealthy counterparts.
“I believe I can prove,” said a commentator in the nineteenth century,
“by means of a genealogical table that at least several hundred of the most notorious
Jewish bandits alive form one single family.” [BREUER, p. 249]
This notion of a “single family” has much broader implications. The collective
incestuous economic character of both rich and lower class Jews, unified as
members of an ethno-religious clan and functioning as a self-contained network
within and against the non-Jewish communities in which they lived, even
transnationally, is noted by Deborah Hertz in a commentary about the wealthy
Jews of Berlin who rose to prominence in the eighteenth century:
“None of the loaning, purveying, selling, or investing feats performed
by the wealthy Jews in Berlin could have been executed without the aid
of poor Jews who lived in small villages to the east. Both economic historians
and anti-Semites alike have pointed out that cooperation between
Jewish financiers in various European capitals was indispensable
for Jewish financial interests in this era. It has less frequently been noted
that the international ties linking Jews in different cities were also ties
across the Jewish social hierarchy.” [HERTZ, p. 44]
This Jewish emphasis towards ethnocentric unity and monopolistic economic
control is a foundation of Jewish Diaspora history and surfaces and
resurfaces over the centuries all over Europe. Jews were often expelled (“due as
a rule to economic causes”) [HERTZLER, p. 88] en masse from towns, provinces,
and even entire countries many times in their history.
These include:
012 - Mainz 1446 - Brandenburg 1541 - Prague
1182 - France 1462 - Mainz 1550 - Genoa
1276 - Upper Bavaria 1483 - Mainz 1551 - Bavaria
1296 - England 1483 - Warsaw 1557 - Prague
1306 - France 1492 - Spain 1569 - Papal states
1322 - France 1496 - Portugal 1649 - Hamburg
1394 - France 1496 - Naples 1669 - Vienna
1420 - Lyons 1498 - Nuremberg 1744 - Bohemia
1421 - Austria 1510 - Brandenberg Moravia
1424 - Cologne 1515 - Genoa Prague
1438 - Mainz 1533 - Naples 1891 - Moscow
1439 - Augsburg 1541 - Naples [SIEGEL, p. 127-129]
On a more local scene, in England alone, for example, resulting from complaints
and animosities against Jews leading up to their expulsion from the
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